Whatever else was to be said of the roads hereabout,--and the question is of paramount importance in such a country, where mails and supplies must be transported thirty miles (a two days’ journey for loaded wagons),--they were almost ideally perfect from a walking naturalist’s point of view; neither sandy nor muddy, the two evils of Southern roads in general, and conducting the traveler at once into wild and shady places. The village is closely built, and no matter in which direction I turned, the houses were quickly behind me, and I was as truly in the woods as if I had made a day’s march from civilization. A straggling town, with miles of outlying farms and pasturelands, through the sunny stretches of which a man must make his way forenoon and afternoon, is a state of things at once so usual and so disheartening that the point may well be among the earliest to be considered in planning a Southern vacation. In a new country an ornithologist thinks first of all of the birds peculiar to it, if any such there are; and I was no sooner off the hotel piazza for my first ante-breakfast stroll at Highlands, than I was on the watch for Carolina snowbirds and mountain solitary vireos, two varieties (“subspecies” is the more modern word) originally described a few years ago, by Mr. Brewster,[8] from specimens taken at this very place. I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile over the road by which I had driven into the town, after dark, on the evening before, when I was conscious that a bird had flown out from under the overhanging bank just behind me. I turned hastily, and on the instant put my eye upon the nest. My ear, as it happened, had marked the spot precisely. “Here it is,” I thought, and in a fraction of a minute more the anxious mother showed herself,--a snowbird. The nest looked somewhat larger than those I had seen in New Hampshire, but that may have been a fault of memory.[9] It contained young birds and a single egg. I was in great luck, I said to myself; but in truth, as a longer experience showed, the birds were so numerous all about me that it would have been no very difficult undertaking to find a nest or two almost any day.